A lone motorcyclist (Wang Baoqiang) in a remote area of China is accosted by three young hatchet-wielding bandits. He pulls out a gun and shoots them all, chasing down the final robber with chilling efficiency.

From such a brutal opening, most filmmakers would continue to ratchet up the body count. Director Jia Zhang-ke divides his movie into roughly four overlapping segments that also seem to promise a widening spiral of bloodshed: Next, the impoverished Dahai (Jiang Wu) extracts gory vengeance from the local bigwigs who have been oppressing him.

Yet from there, Jia upends convention. His movie gets quieter, the violence comes more slowly. Hardship makes these people direct their anger inward as well as outward.

China’s explosive economy hasn’t merely left Jia’s characters behind, it’s crushing them to death. This is nowhere more apparent than when a receptionist in a massage parlor refuses to have sex with a patron, and he methodically hits her with a stack of money, over and over. The humiliation on this woman’s face (she’s played by Zhao Tao, Jia’s wife and muse) is one of the harshest things in a relentlessly harsh film.

“A Touch of Sin” is by no means subtle, but it is composed with a passion and sinuous grace that makes it far more effective than many other sincere message movies.